Curse of the Freeze
by spiderlillie
Summary: Random one shot. Mouse and Jay friendship. Mouse visits Chicago to find Jay in the hospital with hypothermia.


Random one shot, no real time line, somewhere post S5. I just miss Mouse. His and Jay's friendship/broship was adorable.

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"I leave you alone for too long and you decide to go swimming in February."

Jay's body is swaddled in all kinds of blankets and heating pads. A separate smaller blanket folded neatly at the top of his head, leaving only his face visable. There's an oximeter attached to his ear lobe and a nasal cannula of oxygen under his nose. Other lines and tubes sneak beneath the blankets. He swallows thickly and blinks slowly up: Mouse. He can't stop the smile that spreads across his face, even in his current drowsy state.

"Wasn't expecting you home... would have waited for you to join me." Jay says, his voice is low and groggy but his face turns into a faint impish grin. He shifts a little to get a better look up at Mouse as his friend comes to stand by the bed.

Mouse gently lays a hand on Jay shoulder to settle him from moving before checking out the monitors. He lets out a low whistle. "Nah man, glad I missed it."

"Everything is still really low isn't it?" Jay asks, his voice a soft frustrated whine.

Mouse nods giving him a sympathetic smile as he drags a chair to the side of the bed. Once he's settled beside Jay, he reaches his hand under the cover to find his friend's hand. It's cold and clammy but he can feel some warmth to it. Jay gently squeezes his fingertips back, it's grounding for both of them.

"So did Voight finally get tired of you and kick you in or did you jump in voluntarily?" Mouse asks after a few moments of comfortable silence. Before Will has directed him down to a trauma room, he had given Mouse only a brief explanation of Jay being in a frozen pond before being paging and having to rush off down the hall.

Jay lets a crooked smile fill his face. "Voight loves me. He told me not to die while we were waiting on the ambulance. If that's not love from Voight, I don't know what is."

"He probably just didn't want to have to do the paperwork of replacing you." Mouse tells him with a soft chuckle.

"I'm irreplaceable. How many detectives could willingly get taken by a suspect, chained to some cinder blocks, shoved into the water and not die?"

"Willingly?" Mouse persus his lips in confusion.

"Well, that part Voight doesn't love but you'll get it. I was under on a case and left our set location because the guy was talking about how he heard about this auction where you could buy uranium. Didn't realize my cover had actually been blown and it was a set up." Jay explains just as a sudden chill racks his body. Mouse gives Jay's cold hand a squeeze as his friend's face clouds with discomfort. Finally he blows out a breath settling down. "Have I mentioned how much this sucks yet?"

Mouse gives him a sad smile. "I know man, but on the bright side, Will told me on my way in that your temperature was up three degrees from the last time they checked it. And I looked up some things, if you're shivering again it means you've made it out of the moderate stage into the mild of hypothermia."

Jay sighs. "Woohoo. Speaking of Will, I haven't seen him in the last thirty seconds, he finally chill out or no?"

"No." Mouse tells him. "You stress him out, man. He was going to walk me in here but got paged."

"Good. He's been driving me crazy." Jay tilts his head and lowers his voice. "Apparently Voight wasn't the only who didn't love the 'willingly' part."

Mouse pauses for a second. "No shit."

They both let out a soft laugh just as there is a knock on the glass door. Jay bites his lower lip, leaning up, expecting his tired brother to come peering in, instead it's the soft spoken nurse Monique appears.

"Hey Detective Halstead. I'm sorry to interrupt your visit." She says meeting Mouse's eyes. Jay can feel a soft click in his frosty mind.

"It's okay, he's family." Jay answers with a smile. "This is Mouse."

She tilts her head for a second almost unsure if she heard him right. But Mouse has already jumped up to shake her hand. "Mouse, it's an odd name I know, but it's what most everybody calls me. My mother actually named me Greg though."

"Monique." She smiles warmly at him.

"Beautiful name. But I'm guessing you're not here to meet me, so much as you're here to check on Halstead here."

"Right, I have to check his temperature." Monique explains taking a deep breath. "To get the most accurate reading we've been having to do it internally so..."

"It's okay, he can stay. He's seen me in worse." Jay tells her with a sigh. Years ago, when they came home from their tour, Jay had come down with a bad stomach virus. He hadn't been able to keep anything down. And given that he was still recovering from the Humvee incident he couldn't really be left alone. Jay would later return the favor on a night when Mouse had had a bad day and started binge drinking at daybreak.

Mouse having quickly put together where she meant, takes a hold of Jay's left shoulder and helps him roll slowly to his side, trying his best to do most of the work as Jay draws up his knees till he's nearly in the fetal position. He helps Monique pull layers of covers in different directions till she's down to his bare flesh. So he takes a hold of Jay's hand and lets Monique do the rest.

"Tell me about the desert." Jay asks Mouse, hoping for a distraction. He hates being poked and prodded, hates even more to be so helpless.

"Mm warm, dry." Mouse begins. He's careful about cupping a hand on Jay's face to keep him from turning his head. His friend has a horrible habit of trying to watch and probably had when they taken his temperatures earlier, but Mouse figures somethings are best left unseen. He had only gotten a quick glance at the cylindrical thermometer but even the thought of where it was going made him uncomfortable.

"Sounds like paradise." Jay mumbles with a nod.

"The wind and sand sucks but can't have everything I guess." Mouse keeps talking as Jay wrinkles his forehead. "Relax, and just keep listening, okay?"

"Almost done." Monique tells him softly.

"We had a dust storm about a week ago, hate those things. But it was absolutely gorgeous afterwards. Sun was out and you could see for miles. Got hot as fire though the next night."

"Makes me remember why I don't miss that place. Although today I would be tempted to be there instead of here. So how long are you in the wonderful Windy City?" Jay asks trying to keep up distracting his mind from feeling Monique's fingers against his backside.

"Fourteen whole days." Mouse answers. "I would normally expect hockey games and beer but I'm guessing you aren't going to be into frozen anythings for awhile, so I'll settle on just beers."

Jay rolls his eyes and smiles. "Yeah, no, only beers for at least the first week."

"All done." Monique announces taking off her gloves. "You're temperature has made it up to 92. So we can probably start taking your temperature temporally next time."

"I never thought I would be happy to have a body temperature of 92," Jay tells her as Mouse helps him roll back over and get settled in his nest of blankets. "But I'm very happy even if my faces doesn't look it right now."

She smiles, her eyes bright as always. "Well, is there anything else I can get you or anything else I can do right now?"

Jay shakes his head. "I can't think of anything I need, except one small favor?"

"Sure, what I can do for you?"

"Well, I was actually wondering if on your next break if you would want to help Mouse find a cup of coffee? He's kinda unfamiliar with the place you know."

"You totally don't have to if you don't want to." Mouse interrupts Jay, already catching on to what he's up to.

"Oh, it wouldn't be a problem at all." Monique beams. "I got one coming up in about twenty minutes so I'll just come back by."

"Thank you." Mouse tells her with his own bright smile. "I'll see you then."

Once she's gone out the door Mouse sits back down in his chair and studies Jay who has closed his eyes but let the impish grin resurface.

"You're welcome." Jay says in the silence without opening his eyes.

Mouse rolls his eyes but smiles. "You need sleep, man. You need to rest and stop. But thank you."

"Will you still be here if I fall asleep?" Jay asks drowsily. His body temperature may finally be easing back into a normal range but he still feels weak and sleepy. He hears his phone buzz and briefly opens his eyes to tap the screen and sees Hailey Upton's name appear on the screen. He hands it slowly over to Mouse before pulling his numb feeling fingers back up under the blankets. "Text her back and tell her I'm okay, just sleepy."

Mouse takes the phone taps out the message with a quick speed and presses the reply button. "Of course, nowhere else I would rather be. Don't worry about a thing, just get some rest man."

Jay pokes his hand back out from under the covers and Mouse laces his fingers back into Jay's, careful to pull the blanket back over his exposed fingers. With his free hand Mouse checks the rest of the messages from members of Intelligence and types back quick replies, repeating the same message he had sent to Hailey Upton. Erin Lindsay's replacement if Mouse remembered right from what Jay had briefly mentioned one time over the last several months. He can tell by the deep, steady breaths Jay is taking that he's fallen back in a deep sleep. So much of Intelligence has changed in the time Mouse has been gone, Jay kept everything light, quick, and casual but he still knew there had been rough moments. Including Alvin Olinsky's death. That one felt the deepest cut to Mouse, it's one thing for some to leave with a new job, it's another for them to die suddenly. He shakes his head, stiffly shoving back the thoughts of death. Sometimes it felt like he had abandoned his friend, but sometimes that's just the way life falls. A few minutes later Will Halstead finally appears to make his regular check on his brother.

"He been sleeping this whole time?" Will asks quietly, coming to stand on the other side of the bed.

"Nah, he woke up for a little while, long enough to tell me this happened because he was 'willingly' a dumb ass and to have his temperature checked again. He's up to 92 degrees."

"Thank God. I never thought we'd get it back in the 90s." Will says with a sigh. He places his hand on Jay's forehead, relieved to finally be able to feel a noticeable warmth on his flesh. In his sleep Jay rolls his head towards Will and lets out a content sigh. Will smiles stroking down stray strands of his brother's short hair. "You think I could just get him a plastic bubble or something and make him stay there?"

Mouse lets out a little laugh as they watch Jay Halstead sleep. "Nah man, he'd still find some trouble. He's like a magnet for it or like got a voodoo curse on him or something."

Will chuckles softly too, the worry he's felt all day since Jay had been brought in to Med finally escaping him. He understood why Mouse and Jay were so close, for all his small quirks, Mouse has a soothing presence. He's glad his brother has always had Mouse, even when Will himself wasn't around. "Well maybe the curse of the freeze will teach him a lesson for at least a couple of days."

* * *

End!

Short and random and kinda meh but I've been feeling the need to write for a long, long time, so I started polishing up some things I had saved in my files just to get something out.

Thank you all for reading! Every little comment, fave, and follow makes my heart happy. =)


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